In
the early 80s women had just finished winning all of the
court battles that actually got us out of areas like juvenile
and into some of the more sophisticated areas, and so I
thought I’m going to have a woman police detective,
and then when Kate Delafield walked onto the page, that’s
when I found that this was really the interesting character.
So she kind of fell out of a tree, in a manner of speaking.
Then I realized what a fabulous character she was to write
about, for so many reasons: she’s in a high-profile,
high-visibility, high-pressure profession, and she was closeted,
which police officers with great justification felt they
needed to be in those times, because a lot of times their
life was at stake. All you need is somebody not to call
backup when you need to have backup….The closet is
my great overriding passion as a writer, and Kate Delafield
presents the very best possible case for being in the closet.
I just wanted to explore what it did to her because the
closet kills us, it really does, spiritually, emotionally,
physically, every way.
AE:
How has Kate changed over the course of eight books? You’ve
brought her out of the closet a little bit. KVF:
She’s still closeted to some degree to this very day. In this
newest book there’s a line where [her friend] Maggie says
something to the effect of, “you’re like a bird in a
cage and the cage door has been opened, and you’re too used
to being in the cage to fly out.” Kate just gets really pissed,
and she thinks, you don’t understand, you don’t know
what it’s like to have my job and my life and my demons. To
some degree she has come out but there’s still that closeted
mentality. The current book, Hancock Park, is very much
a crossroads, because Kate is now starting to glimpse the damage
that it’s done to her life and her choices and how she’s
limited herself, isolated herself on the job. You know, just the
horrible price that we pay when we make a choice like that. For
her, it is a choice, not a necessity.
AE:
Can you tell me a little bit about your writing process? KVF:
They all start out with a dramatic situation that I want to explore.
Kate is a good example. In Murder at the Nightwood Bar,
Kate at that time reflected the way a lot of gay and lesbian people
lived in this country. Like her we weren’t part of the visible
community, we didn’t go to bars, we lived in kind of small
enclaves, we had a few lesbian and gay friends, and we were kind
of like little overlapping circles. Then of course things very
rapidly changed, and so in the second book [Nightwood Bar]
I decided that I wanted to connect Kate with that visible community,
and so my dramatic situation was a murder at a lesbian bar, so
that she had no choice.
That
was a really wonderful book for me for a number of standpoints,
because there’s always stuff you want to do in books, but
readers don’t want to be preached to at all. So aside from
writing a mystery novel, it’s a story of a woman’s
journey to community in that novel. Also I wanted the Nightwood
Bar to reflect what I think is the glory of the gay and lesbian
community…we are the only subculture that incorporates all
races, all colors, all creeds, and so I tried to put that in the
bar. I’ve tried to put that in all the books, to have a
multicultural cast of characters, because I think our diversity
is our strength. It’s just something that’s been really
important to me to convey, and I was able to start doing it in
Nightwood Bar, so that book too was kind of important
to me and marks a milestone on my way to becoming a writer for
my community. I do consider myself a lesbian writer, by the way;
I mean I do have crossover fans but I write for a lesbian audience
and I’m very proud of that. My own idea of a crossover audience
is to my gay brothers.
AE:
Now that you’re published by Berkeley, you must get a wider
audience. KVF:
That’s why they picked me up, because they thought that
I had crossover potential, but I’ll tell you it’s
a lot more important to them than to me. It is important to me
just from the standpoint that…I think the books are very
good opportunities to educate a straight audience about what our
issues are and why they matter and what’s important to us.
AE:
Going back to your writing process, once you have this dramatic
situation in mind, where do you go from there, and how long do
you spend working on a book? KVF:
I’ve written a book in a year. I don’t like to, and
neither does my partner (laughs) because I kind of tend to vanish.
I like to have a year and a half. I don’t write very fast
at all. I take a lot of pride in the craft, and I try to write
them at a level where police professionals have no problem with
the accuracy, so I like to have my details authentic.
AE:
Do you do a lot of research? KVF:
I do, but you know I do for all of the books, and…it’s
one of those bonuses that come with being a writer. The book that
came before this one was called Sleeping Bones. It’s
set at the La Brea Tar Pits in LA and I got into the whole world
of paleontology and it was just fascinating. Murder by Tradition—that’s
a book that I really did write for my gay brothers, it’s
about a gay bashing death, and it’s actually based on a
true case that happened in the Midwest in Wisconsin. It’s
a bit like a Law and Order book because it opens with
the investigation and it actually takes the case to court, but
in the process of that I got to talk to the woman who actually
worked on the case, the police officer, and also the blood spatter
expert, who did the analysis of the crime scene. I think it’s
one of the stronger elements in that book, just the real down-to-the-nub
authenticity of how these folks analyze the crime scene. I think
that readers find that interesting; readers coming to mystery
novels consider it kind of a sneaky indulgence, and if they learn
things I think they don’t feel it’s quite as much
of a guilty pleasure. (laughs)
